Category Archives: Technology

On April 20, 2016, Drupal community officially confirmed the release of Drupal 8.1.0. According to the press release published on the official website, they have made significant changes in their release process, adopting semantic versioning and scheduled feature releases. This allows them to make extensive improvements to Drupal 8 in a timely fashion while still providing backwards compatibility. Drupal 8.1.0 is the first such update.

What’s so interesting in Drupal 8.1.x?
According to the Drupal community, Drupal 8.1.0 is released with numerous improvements such as CKEditor WYSIWYG enhancements, added APIs, an improved help page, and two new experimental modules. Experimental modules are provided with Drupal core for testing purposes, but are not yet fully supported.

So, What It Has to Do with Websites Built On Drupal 6, Drupal 7 and Drupal 8?

1. Is your website built in Drupal 8?
If your existing website is built on Drupal 8, then it’s time to upgrade to Drupal 8.1.0 to continue receiving bug and security fixes. The next, very important, bugfix is scheduled to be released on May 4, 2016.
Updating your site from 8.0.6 to 8.1.0 with update.php is exactly the same as updating from 8.0.5 to 8.0.6. Modules, themes, and translations may need small changes for this minor release, so test the update carefully before updating your production site.

2. Is your website built in Drupal 7?
Fortunately, Drupal 7 is still fully supported and will continue to receive security and bug fixes throughout all minor releases of Drupal 8. If you wish to migrated your website built on Drupal 7 to Drupal 8, then there is a new Migrate Drupal UI for Migrate also allows migrating a Drupal 7 site into a Drupal 8 site. However, you may encounter errors or missing migrations when you try to migrate due to incomplete migration path.

3. Is your website built in Drupal 6?
If your website is built Drupal 6, then unfortunately, Drupal 6 is not supported anymore. All you need to do is create a Drupal 8 website and try to migrate all your data into it at the earliest. Your Drupal 6 site can still remain up and running while you test migrating your Drupal 6 data into your new Drupal 8 site.

Contact a Drupal Development Company for Help!
If this new update is beyond your understanding or if you are in need of help, then hire professional and experienced Drupal developers to migrate your existing website to Drupal 8.1.0. You can contact a Drupal development company to hire Drupal professionals on project or on timely basis.

It seems that the search giant, Google, is in no mood to pardon the websites with unnatural linking, especially the unnatural outbound linking. Since last weekend, Google has released many link penalties targeting the outbound links. Google issued many manual actions for unnatural outbound links. The manual action team at Google is taking care of the issue, and penalizing websites that are trying to manipulate the Google Search Results. If you fear, your website is among the one that is penalized, then check your Google Search Console message center immediately.

How do I know, whether my website is penalized or not?

To find out, whether your website has been penalized or not, all you need to do is log into your Google Search Console account and check your all message box to see if you have this notification, or any others. Unfortunately, if you were hit by the outbound link penalties, there are instructions on how to fix them over here.

Here Is Screen Shot of One of the Notices a Webmaster Posted:

Being a webmaster, if you see this notice on the Manual Action Page, then it means that your website is linking outwards to other websites in a manner that Google believes it to be against their SEO guidelines. It also means that Google has found a series of unnatural, unethical, deceptive, or manipulative outbound links. Hence, Google will penalize your website, because according to the Google’s SEO guidelines, purchasing links or participating in link schemes in order to manipulate PageRank is a breaking of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

As a result, Google has applied a manual spam action to the affected portions of your site. Actions that affect your whole site are listed under Site-wide matches. Actions that affect only part of your site and/or some incoming links to your site are listed under Partial matches.

Knowingly or unknowingly, playing with Google’s SEO Guidelines can lead to unfavorable consequences for your website and even for your online business. Therefore, hiring SEO experts is highly recommended.

To help application developers make more money out of their developed apps, Microsoft, during Build 2016, revealed several big changes to the Dev Center. Moreover, Microsoft also confessed to make some useful changes to the app submission process and app promotion. Here are the big announcements by Microsoft at Build 2016:

App developers are now allowed to push updates and data to targeted groups of app users through app flighting.

Different languages can be used for app listing in the Store. This facility will improve the way we communicate with the customers and will also help us in our app marketing efforts. This also means that developers now only have to submit screenshots and store listings in one language if they so choose.

In order to help developers find what content users are seeing more, the Dev Center will start displaying the status of app packages and app metadata updates.

There is a new Windows Store submission API which is currently in preview and being rolled out to select developers in stages. This new API supports submitting updates, modifying metadata, and adding/removing in-app products when submitting apps for publishing.

The dashboard of the Dev Center has been redesigned to work faster and offer more data to developers. Currently, the new dashboard is available for those in the recently announced Dev Center Insider Program.

‘Community Ads’ is the new concept introduced by Microsoft for app promotion. These ads basically endorse other apps within the marketplace and only display when regular paid ads are not available. Developers will earn credits each time their apps show one of these ads and the credits can be used to get their own apps promoted in other apps that are participating in the program.

The concept of promotional codes has been refurbished. From the next month onwards, the creation of promotional codes will take only a few seconds. The Dev Center will start managing advanced promotional codes which can be given expiry dates, have their redemption status checked, and even cancelled if needed.

Live Tile updates & notifications can now be targeted so developers can promote and engage with select demographics.

During Build 2016, Microsoft has announced a lot of new features and products, and all them are pretty substantial. Let us know your comments regarding Microsoft Build 2016.

If you love all the discussions and new releases about Android at Google I/O event, then pack your bag because its back gain with more tech-releases, updates and Android goodness.

Finally, the Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced that the company’s annual I/O developer’s conference has been scheduled for May 18th through the 20th. So, it’s time for you to register yourself to be a part of one of the biggest tech events on the earth. Compared to last year’s Google I/O event, the venue for the event is a bit different – it’s Mountain View’s own Shoreline Ampitheatre. In this article, we take a look at what’s coming up at Google I/O 2016.

How to register for Google I/O 2016?

If you live and breathe Android, then you know that you should not miss the event at any cost. Just like last year, Google is doing a lottery system again this year, meaning anyone can apply to get tickets but only a few will be accepted. The registrations for the event will open from 8th March at 9 am PST, and it will remain open until 10th March at 5 PST. Once the registration period closes, Google will randomly select applicants and notify them via email.

o Go to the Google I/O website during the registration period to start the application process

o Sign in with your Google account

o You may need or may not need a credit card

o General admission tickets cost $900, while academic tickets are $300 each

What to expect at Google I/O 2016?

Google I/O is a developer event, where Google previews the upcoming iteration of Android as well as updates to core products, such as Chromebooks. We also expect to hear stuff about virtual reality, the latest versions of Google Glass, and more. Please go through the list of updates / releases to expect at Google I/O 2016, and they are as follows;

o Android N

o Chrome OS

o Virtual reality

o Android Wear

o Android Auto

o Self-driving cars

o Internet of Things

o Project Ara

o Nexus 7 (2016)

o New messaging platform

o Project Tango

o Project Fi

What if, I can’t attend the event?

Unfortunately, if you don’t get a chance to attend the event, then there are ways you can enjoy the event at your comfort. For instance, you can live stream the event. Yes. The main events are live-streamed via the Google I/O website, so if you’re not attending the event, you can still tune in to watch.

Recently Google has silently released yet another update in its desktop search, which allows the users to view real-time tweets in the search results. This certainly proves to be one of the most happening news in the search industry, especially for those businesses who mostly depends on social media marketing. This ultimately also allows the businesses to keep the tap on the latest trending topics on Twitter.

For instance in the Google desktop search if you search for the British Prime Minister, “David Cameron”, the search results will also bring up his official Twitter Handle, starting from his latest post.

Also while searching for “#deadlineday” will pull up the latest tweets of this trending topic. Herein, the most recent hashtag post will appear first in the results, while the remaining will be placed in random orders.